The folks at Lake Superior State University in Michigan have just released their recommendation for words and phrases that should be erased from our vocabulary in its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.

It is an amazement to me that people seem to find columns about grammar interesting. I feel, every time I write one, that I am back teaching school and I can envision my readers falling asleep as they read a somewhat esoteric discussion about a grammar question.

Your parakeet may be the only one who noticed, but I didn't write my column last week. I'd planned to offer some snappy New Year's resolutions, but I procrastinated and the next thing I knew, my first grandson - Daniel Christopher McCoy - was on his way, and I was off to the hospital to meet him. Yep, I'm a grandfather now, and my whole life is changing. I was expecting to be able to handle this title with ease, but being a grandfather is more powerful and transformative than I knew. If you have grandkids, you'll ...

Some things just never change. We shake off the stresses and excesses of the holiday season that began way back at Thanksgiving and then ring in the New Year with sometimes-forced merry-making and excesses of another kind. (Here's hoping you chose ABC's Ryan Seacrest and Dick Clark, bless his heart, as late night companions over CNN's Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin on CNN. Oh my aching head, and it wasn't the champagne!)

It is with a great deal of pleasure that I announce the Yarbrough Worldwide Media and Pest Control Company, located over a pool hall in Greater Garfield, has signed an exclusive contract with one of the nation's premier prognosticators, Plum Nelly Pitts, of Varnell, Ga.

It seems that the more I delve into the facts surrounding the process of the acquisition of the Norfolk Southern Railroad Right of Way and its conversion to trails, the more clear it becomes that the entire endeavor is much more costly and complex than previously portrayed.

Last night, after traveling from Atlanta, my family and I arrived - hungry and tired - in Des Moines, Iowa. We are staying in the home of a friend who is out of town and decided to order pizza. I found a restaurant on Google Maps and called to place the order, only to be informed that I had reached the wrong location. The man on the other end of the line gave me the number of a different location, which I called. The promised delivery time was 45 minutes to an hour. Not too speedy, I thought, but good enough. I ...

Do you find yourself continually searching for the most mundane things? I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time looking for my car keys. But only when I am in a hurry. It must be an axiom that you only lose things when you are in a hurry and have no time to look for them. Do you dial your cell phone from your land line because you can't find your cell phone? I do.

Scientists everywhere are decoding the human genome to see what we're made of and how we can make ourselves better. I'm no geneticist, but I know a little bit about southerners, and I'll certify that there is a special part of our DNA that makes us what we really are. We may be talking about just a few genes, but we southerners are programmed in a way that makes our lives much better here in our little part of the world.